Overcoming Computing Limitations

Dr. Volker Sorger and his colleague Dr. Tarek El-Ghazawi are the principal investigator and co-principal investigator, respectively on a three-year, $1.3 million grant jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC).

The project is titled “Collaborative Research: Nanophotonic Neuromorphic Computing,” and Drs. Sorger and El-Ghazawi are collaborating on it with Dr. Pruncal of Princeton University.  Under this innovative and interdisciplinary project, they will develop future nano-photonic neuromorphic processors, inspired by the brain.  The project is a part of a longer range vision and direction by Drs. Sorger and El-Ghazawi to achieve orders of magnitude improvements over today’s computing technologies through nano-photonic-enabled computing (NEC), using innovative principles for processing and architectures that depart from the traditional von Neumann digital computer systems and their limitations.

The project is funded under the highly competitive and prestigious Energy-Efficient Computing: from Devices to Architectures (E2CDA) program.  The E2CDA program addresses the problem that future performance improvements across the board are now severely limited by the amount of energy it takes to manipulate, store, and transport data.